Textual Summarisation of Large Sets: Towards a General Approach

Shneiderman's mantra, "Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand", highlights the importance of giving readers a high-level overview before offering detail. We apply this idea to generate an overview of sets of objects, hypothesising that an overview will be beneficial to readers who want to understand the set. Previously we investigated the domain of consumer products, focusing on descriptions of products (such as TVs) which are intended to help readers decide which specific products to buy. Now we aim to generalise the techniques we have developed, by looking at a very different type of domain, namely bibliographical references in academic papers.